Friday 2 and Saturday 3 December 2005
Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies
University of London, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
This conference attempt to address the gap in Italian colonial scholarship by examining the value of ‘hybridity’ in its many formulations as a critical tool to help understand the specific nature, circumstance and practice of the Italian colonial or postcolonial condition.

Scholars of Italian colonialism have sometimes been reluctant to acknowledge the influence that local populations and their modes of social practice had on Italians and on the ways in which they settled and administered the territories they occupied. This tendency reinforces the notion that the European domination of Africa was total culturally and politically. Conversely, it has also been suggested that in every sphere of colonial life, the relationship between colonizers and colonized was more dynamic and complex.

In the broader field of colonial/postcolonial studies, this proposition would not be startling. For example, the concept of the ‘contact zone,’ the potent and unpredictable space where colonizers and colonized interact has been well-explored. Even more extensively adopted is the term ‘hybridity’ that occurs frequently in the language of colonialism and the discourse of postcolonialism. Its meaning is not fixed. It is often used quite loosely to refer to more or less any form of cultural fusion so displacing the term’s origins in post-Enlightenment anxieties about sexual reproduction. The question remains whether hybridity is a consciously chosen state, one that is arbitrarily imposed, or one that inevitably results from the scontro/incontro of two (or more) cultures.

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